His gaze held mine for several seconds. Then he made a visual inventory of the rest of me, evidently ticking off the parts I did and didn’t have on some mental list.
When he was done, Gallagher gave me a quick nod. “Shower,” he said, then he glanced at each of his subordinates and gave a brief report. “Nothing of interest.”
I stepped into the shower, my face flaming as the other men snickered. Something landed on the shower floor at my feet and I looked down to find a clear plastic shower kit containing a tiny bottle of shampoo and a small bar of soap.
The razor was notably missing, and I had no intention of lingering long enough to use the little tube of depilatory cream.
I washed as quickly as I could, and when I turned off the water, Gallagher nodded to Clyde, who tossed a threadbare white towel over his shoulder. I had to scurry across the concrete, nude and dripping wet, to catch it before it hit the filthy floor.
The radio clipped to Gallagher’s waistband buzzed as I wrapped the towel around myself. When I reached for my clothes, he paused with the radio in hand and shook his head. “No personal clothing.” He nodded to Clyde again, who knelt to pull a wad of gray fabric from the same box that had produced the ratty towel. Clyde tossed the garment over his shoulder, and I caught it with one hand, holding my towel closed with the other.
“What?” Gallagher said into his radio as I shook the material out and held it up.
“The crate’s ready,” a voice said through the static.
“Be right there.” He clipped the radio to his belt again and eyed me expectantly. “Let’s go.”
I held the dress up for him to see. “This is it?” Uniform C had turned out to be a very thin, very short gray peasant dress, sleeveless and gathered at the waist. It was better than the werewolf girl’s tube top and bikini bottom, but not by much.
He frowned at Clyde. “Give her the rest of it.”
Clyde dipped back into his box for a much smaller wad of material, and a second later I caught a pair of white cotton underwear, tangled around a cotton bra with no wires. They were clean, and approximately the right size, but worn thin.
“These are used.”
“Uniforms are community property,” Clyde said without turning. “You get whatever’s clean, and if you’re lucky, it’ll fit.”
Clenching my jaw so hard my whole face ached, I stepped into the underwear without taking off the towel, then turned away from them to put the bra on and pull the thin dress over my head. When I was clothed, Gallagher nodded to his men.
They turned as I was wringing water from my hair with the towel.
“Much better.” Clyde eyed the dress and my dripping hair, but I didn’t understand what he meant until I glanced in the mirror behind him.
I looked like a peasant from the Renaissance Fair. Or a servant from a fairy tale—a child’s story, not an actual tale of the fae. I certainly didn’t look like I hailed from a world of cell phones, high-speed internet, and mass-produced blue jeans. And that, of course, was the point.
The uniforms, like the cages, were a visual demarcation between humanity and everything else. A symbol of the gulf imposed between us, which they probably considered especially important in my case, because I had no features to identify me as other than human.
Less than human, according to the satisfied glint in Clyde’s eyes.
“Use the toilet. You won’t get another chance for a while.” Gallagher’s focus shifted to Clyde as he backed toward the door. “Watch her while I check her wagon.”
When he was gone, I stepped into one of the stalls, but Clyde’s hand stopped the door when I tried to close it. He and Freddie watched, tranquilizer rifles held ready, as I urinated.
Maybe I should have been relieved that they didn’t make me squat in a box of litter.
Nalah
The centaurs were snoring again. Every few minutes, one of them snorted like a horse in a stable, and the sound was like a knife ripping through the fragile fabric of the young ifrit’s slumber.
Nalah pushed a heavy braid over her shoulder. Light from the waxing moon shone on crimson strands threaded with so many shades of gold and orange that her hair seemed to shift and jump like live flames. No human ever had hair of such colors, nor copper eyes ringed in bronze that flashed like sparks from a bonfire.
By most accounts Nalah was one of the most beautiful ifrits ever born into the djinn peasant class, and she could never, even for a second, be mistaken for human.
On her left, Adira groaned and rolled over on her own blanket. “I can’t sleep,” she moaned, blinking wide blue eyes at Nalah in the dark. “The beasts reek, and it’s too hot to move.”
“Apologies, Princess,” Nalah murmured in the soothing tone she’d mastered as a child. There was nothing she could do about the beasts, and even less she could do about the heat, but she was sorry for it. She understood that being caged with her was both a blessing and a curse for Adira.
Nalah was a loyal companion and an even better attendant—she was well-trained in both arts—but the heat an ifrit radiated by nature contributed nothing to the princess’s physical comfort in the summer. Not that there was much comfort to be found in the menagerie, where royalty and mongrels were treated with equal contempt. “Let me fix your bed, then I will brush your hair. That always helps you sleep.”
Adira crawled off her blanket and tucked her knees to her chest in the farthest corner of their small cage. There wasn’t much room in which to move, but Nalah made do, as she had for the entire year they’d been captives of Rudolph Metzger and his prison on wheels. In seconds, she’d refolded Adira’s blanket into as thick a pad as she could manage. When the princess curled up on the makeshift pallet, moonlight shining on her pale skin and gossamer hair, Nalah folded her own blanket into a pillow and slid it beneath the princess’s head.
Nalah scooted to the far side of their cage, so that any breeze that rolled through would hit Adira first, unimpeded. Then she began to run her fingers through the princess’s long silvery hair, gently untangling it by hand, since they had no comb or brush, nor any other luxury, save each other’s company. As she worked, Nalah hummed a traditional lullaby, one of a dozen she’d mastered by age eight, though the language and the legend it told were not her own.
“I miss the water. Do you remember the pools and fountains at home?” Adira whispered, and the wistful crack in her voice broke her companion’s heart.
“I remember them fondly,” Nalah said, though Adira’s home was not her home. Adira’s fountains were not her fountains. Adira’s people were not her people.
“The water was so clean. So clear. So cold.” She shifted on the makeshift pillow and moonlight glittered in her hair like sunshine on a shallow stream. “I’d give my kingdom for a fucking glass of water, much less a fountain.”
Her kingdom.
Adira actually had a kingdom. She would have had two, if not for the menagerie. If not for imprisonment, and poverty, and long absence from the world of shimmering lakes and fountains she was born into.
Nalah let memories take her as her fingers combed through the princess’s hair out of ingrained habit, yet what she remembered was not the glittering fountains and cool pools of Adira’s childhood, but the roaring flames and cozy hearth fires of her own. Roasted meat, straight off the spit. Grilled fruit and charred marshmallows on sticks. Hot, thick vegetable stews and warm teas sweetened with honey. The remembered taste of sizzling hog fat and seared tomatoes took her back to the feasts of her youth, and memories might have become sweet, warm dreams if not for the unexpected light bobbing in the night a hundred feet away.
The ifrit’s fingers paused. Her copper eyes narrowed, trying to focus on a face in the dark, but it was the outline of his form and a familiar gait that finally brought recognition. Those, and the silhouette of the cap on his head.
/> “Gallagher!” Nalah gasped. Her hand flew immediately to her mouth, as if she could stuff the word back inside, but it was far too late for that.
“Ow!” Adira clutched her head, and Nalah was humiliated to realize her clumsy fingers had pulled out several strands of her companion’s hair.
“Apologies, Princess,” she breathed, but Gallagher had heard, and he was headed their way.
“You two should be asleep,” the handler growled, tugging the bill of his cap lower on his forehead. Something clicked near his hand, and the flashlight was extinguished, momentarily blinding the girls with the sudden darkness.
Adira rose, propped on one thin arm. “You try sleeping in a cage surrounded by livestock.”
“I’ve slept under much worse conditions,” he said, and Nalah flushed at the scorn in his tone. She dreaded his disapproval, even when it was not aimed at her.
“How close are we?” Adira demanded when his censure floated right over her head.
“Close.” He spoke so softly Nalah had to strain to hear him. “We’ve hit a delay, but we’re still close.”
The princess huffed impatiently. “What kind of delay?”
“The kind that’s none of your business.”
“You’re being paid. Everything you do is my business.”
The handler stepped closer to the cage and his voice became a fierce rumble. “I haven’t been paid yet, Princess.”
Adira made an angry sound deep in her throat. When she began to braid her own hair, pointedly ignoring him, Gallagher’s gaze fell on Nalah. “Try to get some sleep,” he said softly.
The ifrit’s heart pounded so hard her dress trembled over her chest with each beat. “My needs are few and insignificant,” she assured him, and the dismayed look he gave her burned all the way to her soul.
When the thud of his footsteps faded into the night, Adira laughed. “Your needs are not so insignificant after all,” she teased. “Nor are they difficult to fulfill. If you offer yourself, he will have you.”
“I couldn’t.” Nalah’s cheeks flushed and the heat emanating from her swelled with humiliation.
“I could. Shall I offer you to him?”
“Only if that brings you comfort, Princess.”
At her companion’s expected reply, Adira gave a satisfied cluck of her tongue, and Nalah’s flaming face began to cool. Her fingers found the princess’s hair again, and she repaired the braid Adira had botched.
Moments later, the princess sat bolt upright, sniffing the air like a hound on the scent of prey. “Water.” Her voice shook with anticipation. “Clean water. I need it, Nalah.”
“Of course. Where...?”
“There.” Adira pointed into the dark, and a second later the shadows shifted with movement. When the form came closer, Nalah recognized both the handler—the others called him Wallace—and what he held: a bottle of water. Fresh and unopened.
She rose to her knees and cleared her throat to catch his attention. When he looked her way, Nalah released the shoulder strap holding her thin dress on and let the material fall over her calves on the floor of her cage, highlighted by a pool of moonlight.
The handler came closer, licking his lips as his gaze wandered over her firm bronze flesh. “What does Her Highness require tonight?” His words were sharp with sarcasm, but his willingness to oblige was as obvious as the bulge beneath his zipper.
“Water,” the princess said, seated at the back of the cage with her legs neatly folded beneath her. “You may take her, in exchange for the bottle in your hand. Full and unopened,” the princess added at the last second. They’d been burned by vague phrasing before.
“Done.” The handler fumbled to open the door, then pulled Nalah from the cage as he tossed the water bottle inside. He locked the cage with one hand, the other bruising her arm.
Adira had drained the bottle of water with a satisfied belch before the first ugly grunt echoed from the shadows behind her cage.
Delilah
Gallagher cuffed my hands in front of me with regular steel cuffs and led me out of the bathroom onto the deserted midway, where he took the tranquilizer rifle from Clyde. “You two turn in her clothes, then hit the sack. I got it from here.”
“You sure?” Freddie eyed me while I curled my bare toes on the rough sidewalk.
Gallagher gave him a terse nod.
Freddie took off after Clyde, with the box containing my stuff tucked under his arm.
Gallagher took my arm and marched me toward the rear exit of the fairgrounds.
I looked up at him, but the bill of his hat shielded most of his face from the couple of lampposts we passed beneath. “Aren’t you afraid I’ll try to liquefy your gray matter?”
“You don’t know how. That’s as much a problem for me as it is for you.”
“Are you sure?” The paved path ended at the open gate. The grass was scratchy but surprisingly cool against the soles of my feet. “I could just be biding my time, waiting for you to get careless.”
The huge ring of keys attached to his belt jangled and clanked with every step. “I’m never careless. And if you knew how to turn back into...whatever you are, you would have tried to kill us and escape while you were uncuffed.”
“I’m not a killer.” No sense denying that I was a flight risk, especially when I spotted a double line of circus cage wagons up ahead. They were great hulking shadows cast into the larger darkness by a line of tall lampposts.
Gallagher made a skeptical sound deep in his throat. “Of course you’re a killer. You just lack experience in the field.”
“You don’t know anything about me.”
One dark brow rose in the shadows beneath the bill of his cap. “You’re an only child. Labeled ‘gifted’ in elementary school. High school salutatorian. Undergraduate degree in crypto-biology from Colorado State—on scholarship—then you came back home to handle deposits and withdrawals at the local credit union.”
I stopped walking to stare up at him. “How do you know all that? Why do you know all that?”
“My job is to break you. The more I know about you, the easier that will be.”
My gaze fell and I stared at my bare feet, mentally wading through shock to process not just what he’d said, but the utter lack of emotion with which he’d said it. His job was to break me, and he would do that with no more regret than when he got dressed and brushed his teeth in the morning. Breaking me was just something else on his to-do list.
Yet he was the only one at Metzger’s who’d spoken to me like a person.
“Why did you make those other handlers turn around?” I would already be one step closer to broken if he had let Freddie and Clyde watch me shower. Was that kindness just a setup for my inevitable psychological fracture? Show me mercy now, so that later his cruelty would seem all the more cruel?
Gallagher shrugged his massive shoulders. “I don’t have to start breaking you until tomorrow.”
“And that won’t bother you because you think I’m a killer?”
For a second, I thought he’d actually answer. Then Gallagher tugged me forward again.
“I— Ow!” A jagged rock bit into my heel and sent sharp pain up my leg. I hopped on my left foot, reaching to clutch the bruised sole of my right before I remembered my hands were cuffed again.
Gallagher hauled me upright before I could fall over.
“Can I at least get a pair of shoes?”
“I can’t issue anything that would help you escape.” He took my arm again. I couldn’t pull free, so I dragged my feet in silent protest, as well as out of caution. The dark grass suddenly felt like a minefield waiting to cripple me with every step.
For several minutes, I followed him in silence, watching the ground for rocks I probably wouldn’t be able to see in the dark anyway. Then
an odd equine snort startled me and I looked up to find the double line of circus wagons just a few yards away.
“Home sweet home,” Gallagher said, and that fact—the visceral reality of it—hit me like sledgehammer straight to my soul.
My feet stopped moving and my mouth fell open. I inhaled as deeply as I could, but the air tasted foul. Like tyranny and manure.
“This can’t be happening.” The world teetered around me, and the very ground seemed determined to toss me like an angry bull. I dropped into a squat, knees and back bent, gasping, but no matter how much air I sucked in and spat out, I couldn’t get a satisfying breath.
“Delilah. Stand up.”
“This isn’t real,” I gasped, my elbows propped on my knees, hands hanging limp, cuffs and all. “This can’t be real.”
“It is, and making me drag you to your crate won’t change that. Stand up.”
But I could hardly hear him over the roar of oblivion devouring everything I’d ever had or been, leaving only an empty shell of me tethered to my brutal new reality by cuffs and chains.
“I’m having a nightmare,” I murmured. But that wasn’t quite right.
I was living a nightmare.
Gallagher squatted next to me and tilted my face up until I saw his gray eyes, finally illuminated in the beam from a light pole. “A cage locks other people out as much as it locks you in, and sometimes that’s for the best.”
“You’re locking me up to protect me? You really expect me to believe that?”
“I’m locking you up to protect everyone. Where you live is not up to you anymore, but how you live is still your choice. I can make things a little easier for you, if you’ll make my job easier for me.”
Fresh anger flared in the pit of my stomach. I tried to shove him back, but that was like trying to push over a tree with my bare hands. “You’re no better than your boss, offering to make me comfortable—for a price.”
Gallagher’s gaze hardened until his eyes looked like onyx pebbles. “I’m far worse than Ruyle.” He grabbed my arm and pulled me upright. His hand tightened around my arm, and when I flinched, he let me go. “But I wasn’t propositioning you. Do not insult me with that assumption again.”
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